Sandy Hook report has grim details, no motive for shooting

A knitted angel and a sign were hanging near a Newtown, Conn., cemetery last December.

From wire reports

Published: 25 November 2013 03:33 PM

Updated: 25 November 2013 10:57 PM

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Adam Lanza

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Four days before Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage at an
elementary school, his mother cooked him some of his favorite meals and then
left for a three-day trip. He had been refusing to talk to her for three months,
communicating with her only by email, although their bedrooms shared the second
floor of their home in Newtown.

The day before the December shooting, Lanza, 20, went to the area around the
school, Sandy Hook Elementary, his GPS device showed.

However, after an 11-month investigation, the Connecticut State Police could
not determine a motive for the attack, one of the nation’s deadliest mass
shootings, according to a 48-page report released Monday.

Lanza attended Sandy Hook between 1998 and 2003, but the report found that
“the shooter indicated that he loved the school and liked to go there.”

The report, which had long been anticipated, was issued by Stephen Sedensky
III, the state’s attorney. It was drawn from the file of the State Police
investigation, some 2,000 pages, according to law enforcement officials.

The horror of the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook, where Lanza
fatally shot 20 first-graders and six adults, has become part of the national
psyche. The report depicts Lanza’s internal life and complicated relationship
with his mother, Nancy, in vivid and chilling detail.

Lanza changed clothes so often that his mother did his laundry every day, but
she was not allowed to enter his bedroom.

He was enthralled by violent video games, including one called School
Shooting, but he also played Dance Dance Revolution, an interactive video game,
at a local movie theater.

His mother, who separated from his father, Peter, in 2001 and lived alone
with Adam, was worried about him, saying she could not have a job because he
required her constant attention. But there was no sign that Nancy Lanza was
concerned he would become violent. The police found a check indicating that she
had planned to give it to him to buy a firearm for Christmas last year. She also
took him to shooting ranges.

By 2012, the report says, Lanza was not in contact with his father or his
older brother, who had also moved away. Nancy Lanza was planning to move from
Newtown, possibly to Washington or to North Carolina, with Adam. To prepare the
house for sale, she intended to buy a recreational vehicle for Adam to sleep in
because he refused to go to a hotel.

On Dec. 13 at 10 p.m., Nancy Lanza returned from her three-day trip to New
Hampshire.

The next morning, her son shot and killed her in her bed at close range. The
.22-caliber rifle that he used was found later by her bedside.

He then went to Sandy Hook armed with 30-round magazines for a Bushmaster
.223-caliber rifle, along with several other weapons. Shortly after 9:30, he
blasted his way through the plate-glass window at the locked front entrance.

In less than 10 minutes, Lanza fired 154 rounds from the rifle, killing the
26 children and staff members. At 9:40, he took his own life with a pistol.

The report comes nearly a year after the massacre set off a national
discussion about gun control, mental health and violence in American popular
culture. In that time, families of the victims have struggled to put their lives
back together, the town has tried to heal and the school itself has been razed.
But, until Monday, very little information compiled by investigators had been
publicly released.

Even basic facts, like the exact path Lanza took inside the school, were kept
secret.

Relatives of the victims were permitted to view a draft of the report earlier
this month.

After months of speaking with investigators, sharing stories with other
families of victims and endless news media accounts, some said there was little
surprising in the draft report. The family of Victoria Soto, a first-grade
teacher whom Lanza shot and killed as she tried to keep her students out of the
line of fire, released a statement noting that there were some questions that
could never be answered.

“While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for
the how. How can we live without Vicki?” the statement read.

The report notes that while Lanza’s
“significant mental health issues” affected his ability to live a normal life
and interact with others, it remained unclear if they contributed to his violent
actions. Lanza was given a diagnosis in 2005 of an autism variant known as
Asperger’s
syndrome, but there is no scientific evidence that people with Asperger’s are
more likely than anyone else to commit violent crimes.

There were reports of troubling behavior by Lanza as early as the fifth
grade, when he produced “The Big Book of Granny” for a class project. The main
character has a gun in her cane and shoots people.

Investigators found a wealth of disturbing digital evidence at the Lanza
home, but were not able to recover any information from one computer hard drive
he destroyed.

Lanza had two videos showing suicide by gunshot, a five-second video
dramatization showing a child being shot, and images of Lanza himself holding a
gun to his head.

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